Old master oil painting found hanging in cottage expected to fetch £100,000 at auction

Dives And Lazarus, by Dirck van Delen, is believed to have hung undiscovered for several decades

Dives and Lazarus’, an Old Master oil painting by Dutch artist Dirck van Delen found in a Welshpool cottage will be auctioned in April 2014

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An old Master oil painting by a Dutch artist discovered in a mid Wales cottage is expected to fetch more than £100,000 when it’s sold at auction next month.

The painting, entitled Dives And Lazarus, by Dirck van Delen, was discovered in a cottage in the Welshpool area by art expert Allan Darwell of Halls of Shrewsbury.

He said: “From the moment I saw it I knew it was 17th Century and special. Because it was so dark in the house, I couldn’t see a set of initials on it. It was only when it was delivered to our saleroom and I examined it closely under lights that I identified the initials of Dirck van Delen.”

The painting has been identified by art historian Bernard Vermet, from the Foundation for Cultural Inventory in Amsterdam, as one of van Delen’s earliest works.

“In many of his paintings, van Delen worked with other artists who inserted the figures. However, in this one, Bernard Vermet says van Delen has painted the whole work, which is quite rare.

“A picture with the same title, Dives And Lazarus, was sold by Christie's in London some years ago. It was said to have been dated to the 1650s and had a different composition as well as a different range of colour tones, as from the 1630s van Delen abandoned the opaque browns and blacks of his first period to use marble grey-greens, light yellow, pale rose and tawny browns.” added Mr Darwell.

The painting was bought by the owner’s father from London art dealers in the 1930s and hung at a family property in Gloucestershire. Mr Darwell believes it had been hanging in the cottage near Welshpool for several decades undiscovered.

Van Delen was a painter who specialised in architectural paintings of imaginary palaces and church interiors in the 17th century, when Dutch art was among the most acclaimed in the world.

“Most of his pictures from the 1620s feature dark, angular, Renaissance-style architecture and usually include a vanishing point exactly in the middle of the work.

“The majority of his mature pictures are scenes of palaces, often with courtyards and grand loggia, but he also produced imaginary church interiors while increasingly abandoning the Renaissance and Gothic styles for a Baroque or Classical order,” said Mr Darwell.

Other artists featured in the auction on April 16 include three brothers from the prestigious Williams family of painters, Benjamin Williams Leader, Henry John Boddington and Sidney Richard Percy.